This is the pet name of the backhoe by a large community of netizens. I first heard the name while I was going to college and working in the Network Operations Center. There was some construction on campus ( renovating the library I think) and a backhoe found the phone cable to some of the dorms. Some poor guy was down in that trench for the next 10 days in the snow and sleet splicing all those fibers together again. My boss there kept the bloody end that they had to cut off in his office as a constant reminder of the danger that we were under.

Since that time, I have noted the uncanny predator-prey relationship that they have with buried cables and collected funny stories about mishaps between backhoes and cables. At one point I had them pasted on the pseudo-walls of my open office plan office for a little privacy and heard more than a few stories from various individuals from different parts of the world about evil backhoes. When I left that company, my co-workers bought me a radio controlled backhoe complete with fiber optic cable remnant.

Backhoes never sleep - Patrick Greenwell